Watch: For Stanley Kubrick, Color Was an Instrument

If you accept that all art is manipulation, which you should, then it should be no stretch to conclude that artists in different disciplines have tools with which they effect that manipulation. One of Stanley Kubrick’s numerous tools, one of the implements with which he managed to transport viewers, was color. The colors have an effect. We may not be able to put into word what the effect is, for instance, of seeing the hallway of the Overlook Hotel in a river of blood in ‘The Shining,’ just as we cannot say what the effect of watching a blue-lit and perturbed Tom Cruise in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ looking down at his sleeping wife might be. Can we say that red is the color of violence? And blue the color of foreboding? Perhaps. But we could just as easily say many other things. Marc Anthony Figueras has put together a rapidfire compilation of Kubrick’s strummings on the instrument of color, and you should take a look, at the very least to explore the effect of these dazzling onslaughts on your mind.